A Review of Contemporary Catholic Poetry, edited by April Lindner and Ryan Wilson

Review by Carla Galdo

April Lindner and Ryan Wilson, eds., Contemporary Catholic Poetry: An Anthology. Paraclete Press, 2024.

Review by Carla Galdo

One of my earliest memories is from the summer just before I turned three years old. I am in a neighbor’s side yard, splashing in a kiddie pool with a friend, when we are inspired to invent what we thought of as a game. We reach our wet hands up and out of the pool and press them onto the red siding of the house, leaving dark, dripping prints on the building’s wall. I remember the warm roughness of the siding, the sight of our handprints evaporating in the heat, and our delight in doing this over and over again, enjoying the evidence that our own small bodies could make some impression on the world, if ever so slight or passing.

April Lindner and Ryan Wilson’s Contemporary Catholic Poetry: An Anthology begins by reflecting on a similar image—the painted prints of ancient human hands, wrought on a stone wall in the Amazon rainforest over twelve thousand years ago. Although the watery prints of little girls just barely out of toddlerhood linger only on the edges of art, both the ancient handprints and our spontaneous summer pastime bear testimony to the enduring human longing to make a mark upon the world. The poets in this volume, like many artists throughout time, have been prompted to respond in wonder to their experience of the world with the return gift of a “made thing.” Their poems are acts of creation; like all art, they are wrought replies to the existence that spreads itself out before us as an offering, or perhaps, a provocation.

Unfortunately, notes Wilson in the book’s preface, many of us can drift about our lives distracted and unaware of the world’s wonders or even its weirdness. Poets are the ones among us who “seem always to be fending off forgetfulness.” The best poets, he explains, write poems that beg readers to pay attention to “the cosmic drama unfolding around us and…[to] the spiritual drama stalking the boards and chewing the scenery within each of us.” The twenty-three poets anthologized in this collection, all born in or after 1950, are rememberers who pay attention well; they are artists who paint the walls of our world with language.

For the sake of this anthology, poets were considered “Catholic” if they were sacramentally initiated into the faith through baptism, and if their poetry evidences in some broad way an imagination formed by the Catholic tradition. However, the poems in this volume do not necessarily feature specifically religious themes, devotions, or imagery. This is a collection that is willing to consider poetry as “Catholic” in the widest sense of the term. Here readers will encounter formal poets and free verse poets, poets of austerity and domesticity, and poets who lean into the sharp edges of suffering and history. The whole of reality, created and offered to humanity by a benevolent hand, is fair game for these “Catholic poets.” As such, any reader, be they a person of faith or not, can profit from this book, which offers an introduction to some of the most attentive and accomplished poets of our time, many of whom are still actively writing and publishing.

Readers ought to beware that, although one endorsement on the back cover suggests this book as mandatory reading for all Catholic school students, the “Catholic” label doesn’t indicate “here is a book I can tuck into my middle-schooler’s backpack without a parental glance.” There are some difficult—though certainly worthy and important—themes that wind their way through the poems of this volume which prudent parents will likely want to preview for themselves. On the other hand, the hard edges of the world featured in some of these poems are likely known to most high school and college aged youth today. What might not be as familiar to these young people is the fact that faith can dwell in these rougher, grittier places, as many of these poems suggest. (If more people remembered this, perhaps the attrition rate from communities of faith would be less precipitous. We all, old and young, need to be reminded that faith can live, walk, speak, breathe, and even create beyond the seemingly safe realms of popular piety and polished pews.)

The poets in this volume seem to intuit, and then offer in their poems, a vision of faith as a space capacious enough to hold all of our questions, a space where one is able not only to risk and seek, but also to dwell and remain. Franz Wright’s “Letter” is a poem written from just such a space, and it is a good example of what the religious poems in this book can be like. It is raw and personal and is set in the idiosyncratic waters of later-in-life conversion. The speaker of the poem lingers at a Catholic mass as an as-yet-uninitiated-visitor who “keep[s] his eyes fixed on the great naked corpse, the vertical corpse / who is said to be love / and who spoke the world / into being.” This visitor is provoked by the consolation that he is beginning to find in this space, and yet he still muses:

          I don’t know what I’m doing there. I do
          notice the more I lose touch
          with what I previously saw as my life
          the more real my spot in the dark winter pew becomes—
          it is infinite…

Wright’s poem leans into the fact that there is no “one way” that the God of history manifests his presence in our lives or speaks His word into our hearts. The writers in this volume witness to this, responding to their perceptions of God at work in the world in ways that are as varied and unique as each of their particular lives. Their poems propose to readers that faith is not simply a set of moral precepts to fastidiously fulfill, but a landscape in which to wonder, wander, suffer, doubt, and ask.

Anyone who is at all in touch with the Catholic poetry world will recognize some well-known writers here—Dana Gioia, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, Timothy Murphy, Carolyn Forché, as well as Ryan Wilson and April Lindner themselves—among many others. Many offer poems that put flesh and features on the quotidian nature of how one might dwell within the faith on a daily basis. James Matthew Wilson’s “March 25, 2020”—one of a series of longer, blank-verse poems he wrote during the 2020 COVID lockdowns—brilliantly sets the oddball days of a housebound family beside the unexpected occurrences of E. Nesbit’s Five Children and It and the sudden gracious glory of the Incarnation. In this poem, one gets a sense of how simultaneous life’s surprises and routines can be, especially when lived within the context of the Catholic faith.

          James blasts his trumpet in the living room; 
          The straining pip-pip-pip of reveille
          Flies unobstructed through my office door. 
          It is—oh, yes—Annunciation Day. 
          How little we expect the news we hear, 
          Until it comes upon us brilliant, blazing, 
          Commanding we not feel the fear we feel,
          And that we must unlearn all that we know, 
          So as to see the hour with new eyes, 
          And, what is more, to trust, somehow, we will 
          Endure that fate whose stroke has yet to fall. 

One benefit of encountering familiar poems in an anthology is the ability to read them with a greater focus and intensity. I already own The Strangeness of the Good, the book of James Matthew Wilson’s work in which the above-mentioned “March 25, 2020” appears, yet reading this poem apart from the longer collection gave me the opportunity to appreciate it as a discrete poetic accomplishment.

Beyond familiar favorites, this collection allowed me to encounter a number of new-to-me poets whose work surprised and delighted, and whose poems offered what Wilson’s preface terms that special poetic “relish” – that “sudden, immediate ‘yes’ that the right words can conjure.” After reading through each set of poems, I tattooed my copy of Contemporary Catholic Poetry with scribbled self-exhortations to “find this book!!” The selected bibliographies proposed for each poet allowed me to discover numerous collections I hope to read through soon.

Thanks to this anthology, I discovered Molly McCully Brown—the youngest featured writer—and her poems steeped in a profound sense of the body’s strengths, fragilities, and contingencies. I pored over David Yezzi’s poems in print for the first time, previously having only heard them read aloud at a live event. I appreciated Kate Daniels who, like a handful of other poets in this book—Carolyn Forché, Kiki Petrosino, Daniel Tobin—either studied, worked, or passed through the environs of my alma mater, the University of Virginia. Her poems reminded me that, although I enjoy reading poetry from earlier eras, as well as poetry foundational to the whole literary tradition, one of the joys of reading contemporary poetry is finding oneself amidst imaginative and physical landscapes that are easily relatable and resonant. I could be this woman, begging for poetic and perhaps Spirit-infused inspiration, featured in Daniels’ “Prayer to the Muse of Ordinary Life”:

          If you are here
          where are you? 
          If you exist,
          what are you? 
          I beg you 
          to reveal yourself.
          I will not judge, 
          I am not fancy.
          My days are filled 
          with wiping noses
          and bathing bottoms, 
          with boiling pots 
          of cheese-filled pasta
          for toothless mouths
          while reading Rilke, 
          weeping.

The substantial biographies offered of each poet are another highlight of this anthology. It is consoling for a poet like myself—someone just getting started in the midst of a busy and full middle-aged life—to discover that Maryann Corbett worked for decades for the Minnesota Legislature, and began to write poetry at age fifty-six. (She has subsequently published two chapbooks and six books.) Alfred Nicol wrote on the side throughout his life, while pursuing work as a farm hand, house painter, and pressman; his featured poems are an example of the diversity of poetic forms to be found in this volume. I’m a sucker for a good baseball poem of any sort, and Nicol’s poem of rhymed quatrains, titled “The Gift,” begins with a shortstop’s speedy grab-and-throw play as an example of how those blessed with exceptional skill can make the hardest things seem simple:

          Quick as thought, the shortstop dives to snag
          the blur of white, and though he’s on his knees, 
          his strong peg beats the runner to the bag.
          The gifted do what’s difficult with ease. 

Nicol proves himself to be similarly “gifted” as a writer. His “Elegy for Everyone”—an homage to Sister Joan Margaret, an exceptional nun who served the poor in Haiti—shines as an example of how flexible and satisfying longer blank verse poems can be.

Lindner and Wilson’s anthology is a comprehensive but accessible collection, and the poems within it are worthy by any standard. The additions of biographies, bibliographies, and introductory materials bump it into the category of required reading for any appreciator or writer of poetry, or for anyone who needs to be reminded—as Wilson notes in yet another eloquent reflection from the book’s preface—that “the world is more complex, more manifold, more mysterious than any mortal mind can fully comprehend, as is the human individual.”

Carla Galdo has written essays and poetry for various groups and publications, including Well-Read Mom, Humanum, Dappled Things, and Modern Age. Carla earned an MTS from the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family, and she is currently completing her MFA thesis in poetry at the University of St. Thomas-Houston. She and her husband live with their six children in Virginia.